How to display animation on long operation without partial post back
This article will show how to render a 'please wait page' while the web server is performing a lengthy operation.
Animated gifs are a good way to show users that an application is busy. If you have ever tried to display an animated gif by client side scripting on a user initiated post back, you will know that the gif is frozen at the first frame. This happens because IE shuts down the background thread while posting back.
The Ajax Partial Postback feature resolves the frozen animation issue, but does not work well with master pages.